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Here's the curious thing: since at least the Vietnam War era of the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States has been almost continuously at war. Certain of those conflicts like the Vietnam War itself and those in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century are still remembered by many of us. Honestly, though, who remembers Grenada or Panama or the first Gulf War or even the struggle against ISIS, the endless (still ongoing) bombing of Somalia, and this country's military adventures in Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Northern Africa? And doubtless, I'm forgetting some conflicts myself. Oh, yes, what about the 1999 bombing of Serbia? So it goes, or at least has gone, for more than half a century.
As Stan Cox pointed out at TomDispatch recently, the U.S. military, as the largest institutional user of petroleum in the world today, now seems at war not just with other countries or terror movements of various sorts, but with the planet itself. And don't forget those 750 bases our military occupies on every continent except Antarctica or the staggering Pentagon and national security budgets that have continued to fund all of the above (and so little else).
Russia has indeed invaded Ukraine, causing a harrowing nightmare all too near the heart of Europe. And China has indeed been dispatching warships, drones, and missiles menacingly close to Taiwan. Still, when it comes to militarizing the planet in these last decades, nothing compares to our own military. And looking back " as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore, who also runs the Bracing Views blog, does today " tell me that it truly isn't the story from hell.
Astore mentions a phrase that no one who lived through the Vietnam years is ever likely to forget: "the light at the end of the tunnel." Even the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam used it about a conflict in which only darkness lay at the end of that very "tunnel." As an image, it was, of course, supposed to offer hope in a war that seemed, like enough of our conflicts in the years that followed, to be going anything but our way. And these days, with such conflicts seemingly heading home in some bizarre fashion, who could doubt that, metaphorically speaking, all of us now find ourselves in some version of that same tunnel " with the light at its end perhaps the flames of an overheating planet. And with that in mind, let Astore explore the nature of the military that so many of your tax dollars have gone to support in these years. And then, be depressed, very depressed. Tom
Integrity Optional
Lies and Dishonor Plague America's War Machine
As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that's exactly what the U.S. military and many of America's senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people. And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they've suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.
Where's the "honor" in that?
It may surprise you to learn that "integrity first" is the primary core value of my former service, the U.S. Air Force. Considering the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971; the Afghan War papers, first revealed by the Washington Post in 2019; and the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, among other evidence of the lying and deception that led to the invasion and occupation of that country, you'll excuse me for assuming that, for decades now when it comes to war, "integrity optional" has been the true core value of our senior military leaders and top government officials.
As a retired Air Force officer, let me tell you this: honor code or not, you can't win a war with lies " America proved that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq " nor can you build an honorable military with them. How could our high command not have reached such a conclusion themselves after all this time?
So Many Defeats, So Little Honesty
Like many other institutions, the U.S. military carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. After all, despite being funded in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn't triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate). Even the ending of the Cold War, allegedly won when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only led to further wanton military adventurism and, finally, defeat at an unsustainable cost " more than $8 trillion " in Washington's ill-fated Global War on Terror. And yet, years later, that military still has a stranglehold on the national budget.
So many defeats, so little honesty: that's the catchphrase I'd use to characterize this country's military record since 1945. Keeping the money flowing and the wars going proved far more important than integrity or, certainly, the truth. Yet when you sacrifice integrity and the truth in the cause of concealing defeat, you lose much more than a war or two. You lose honor " in the long run, an unsustainable price for any military to pay.
Or rather it should be unsustainable, yet the American people have continued to "support" their military, both by funding it astronomically and expressing seemingly eternal confidence in it " though, after all these years, trust in the military has dipped somewhat recently. Still, in all this time, no one in the senior ranks, civilian or military, has ever truly been called to account for losing wars prolonged by self-serving lies. In fact, too many of our losing generals have gone right through that infamous "revolving door" into the industrial part of the military-industrial complex " only to sometimes return to take top government positions.
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